Ch. 4 Morphology

Question 1

affix

Answer 1

a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form.

Question 2

affixation

Answer 2

process of adding a morpheme—or affix—to a word to create either a different form of that word or a new word with a different meaning

Question 3

agglutination language

Answer 3

type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination.

Question 4

allomorph

Answer 4

any of the versions of a morpheme, such as the plural endings s (as in bats ), z (as in bugs ), and iz (as in buses ) for the plural morpheme.

Question 5

alternation

Answer 5

the phenomenon of a morpheme exhibiting variation in its phonological realization.

Question 6

ambiguity

Answer 6

the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words, as opposed to lexical ambiguity

Question 7

analytic language

Answer 7

a language that primarily conveys relationships between words in sentences by way of helper words and word order, as opposed to utilizing inflections.

Question 8

bound morpheme

Answer 8

a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone.

Question 9

bound root

Answer 9

a root which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.

Question 10

closed lexical category

Answer 10

parts of speech (or word classes)—that don’t readily accept new members.

Question 11

compounding

Answer 11

composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes.

Question 12

conjunction

Answer 12

linguistic elements that link two or more words, phrases, clauses, or sentences within a larger unit, in such a way that a specific semantic relation is established between them.

Question 13

content morpheme

Answer 13

a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word.

Question 14

content word

Answer 14

words that name objects of reality and their qualities.

Question 15

derivation

Answer 15

the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un- or -ness.

Question 16

determiner

Answer 16

a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context.

Question 17

form

Answer 17

a meaningful unit of speech

Question 18

free morpheme

Answer 18

a morpheme that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, and a free morpheme is a type of free form.

Question 19

function morpheme

Answer 19

a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning.

Question 20

function word

Answer 20

words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker.

Question 21

fusional language

Answer 21

a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.

Question 22

hierarchal structure

Answer 22

an organizational structure where every entity in the organization, except one, is subordinate to a single other entity.

Question 23

homophony

Answer 23

a set of words are pronounced identically, but have different meanings.

Question 24

incorporation

Answer 24

a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound with its direct object (object incorporation) or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function.

Question 25

infix

Answer 25

an affix inserted inside a word stem.

Question 26

inflection

Answer 26

a process of word formation, in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness.

Question 27

input

Answer 27

the exposure learners have to authentic language in use. This can be from various sources, including the teacher, other learners, and the environment around the learners.

Question 28

lexical category

Answer 28

a part of speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties.

Question 29

lexicon

Answer 29

a language’s inventory of lexemes.

Question 30

morpheme

Answer 30

a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided

Question 31

morphology

Answer 31

the study of the forms of words.

Question 32

open lexical category

Answer 32

the category of content words—that is, parts of speech (or word classes) that readily accept new members.

Question 33

output

Answer 33

the language spoken by second language learners themselves

Question 34

partial reduplication

Answer 34

a reduplication of only part of the word.

Question 35

polysynthetic language

Answer 35

highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. They are very highly inflected languages.

Question 36

prefix

Answer 36

an affix that is joined before a root or stem.

Question 37

preposition

Answer 37

are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations or mark various semantic roles.

Question 38

productive

Answer 38

the degree to which native speakers use a particular grammatical process, especially in word formation.

Question 39

pronoun

Answer 39

a word that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase.

Question 40

reduplicant

Answer 40

The reduplicated segment in a word resulting from a reduplication process.

Question 41

reduplication

Answer 41

in which the root or stem of a word or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.

Question 42

root

Answer 42

a word that does not have a prefix in front of the word or a suffix at the end of the word.

Question 43

stem

Answer 43

a part of a word used with slightly different meanings and would depend on the morphology of the language in question.

Question 44

suffix

Answer 44

is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word.

Question 45

suppletion

Answer 45

the occurrence of an unrelated form to fill a gap in a conjugation (e.g. went as the past tense of go ).